Obama’s Immigration Advantage

Romney is trying to ignore immigration issues, but a new poll gives Obama a 34-point lead among Latinos. First Readcompares Obama and Romney messaging:

Yesterday, Romney spoke to a Latino audience — the Latino Coalition Economic Summit in DC — but he didn’t say anything about immigration or even Marco Rubio’s DREAM Act. Instead, he rolled out his education plan before this audience. The Romney campaign believes it needs just one message, rooted in the economy, to speak to everyone (Latinos, women, seniors). By contrast, the Obama campaign’s message is much more targeted. (Just compare the Team Obama’s Spanish-language advertising, which individually targets Latinos, to Team Romney’s, which simply translates an English ad to Spanish.)

Romney's retreat on this issue really opens up an opportunity for the Obama administration, which is reportedly skittish about Rubio's plan. There's really no reason for Obama not to endorse it if and when it comes out. Not only will it make it impossible for Romney to take the opportunity Rubio is offering him, but there's little chance the legislation will pass because the GOP's anti-immigrant base wants to deport every single undocumented immigrant in America, making the Rubio plan a non-starter. Politically, the worst case scenario for the administration is that the proposal passes, and a group of undocumented immigrants who are American in all but name and are here through no fault of their own avoid being kicked out of the country. So it's not just politically smart—it's the right thing to do.